Let’s Yam!

By Sean Kelly, Marketing & Communications Manager

Have you heard of Yammer?

It’s an internal communication tool based on the social sharing ethos of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

So, it’s social media: connecting, sharing, engaging. But for private, internal use within organizations.

A Douglas College Yammer account emerged in February and just 10 weeks later, 229 employees have signed on, with more joining every day. So far, those members have created over 50 groups and sent more than 600 messages. This level of interest and activity is impressive, considering that this new Yammer community has grown organically, simply through members inviting colleagues to check it out.

If you haven’t joined Yammer yet or received an invitation to join, you probably will soon.

Getting started is easy. If you have a douglascollege.ca email account, you can sign up right now.

If you’ve used Facebook, Yammer will look familiar. If you’re new to social networks, then Yammer may seem strange at first. But the interface and functionality are intuitive, and you’ll get a feel for it soon enough.

What can you do in Yammer?

Join/create groups for discussion of ongoing themes, or for use by work groups. Follow people. Engage: with everyone, with groups or with particular individuals. Share information, observations, insights, links, files, images, etc. Ask for feedback and crowdsource answers. Create repositories of useful information.

I’m enthusiastic about Yammer. It’s light years ahead of old-fashioned static intranets. And it’s superior to email in many ways. Email sucks at group and threaded discussions. And it sucks as a repository of information. Yammer is good at those things.

And that’s my counter to the understandable concern that Yammer will only add to your already overloaded psychic space with yet one more communication channel to pay attention to.

Imagine if inefficient email conversations (and meetings) move to Yammer where they are more open, accessible and transparent. Imagine if the information you need right now to do your job is more accessible. Imagine being able to quickly and easily pull together a task team to solve a problem.

Less email, more Yammer could be a net gain in time and productivity.

A constant complaint at Douglas College is that we are too siloed, too isolated from one another. We want to know what colleagues in other areas are working on. We want to learn from others and share the knowledge and best practices we’ve acquired. We’d like to collaborate more to solve problems and launch new initiatives.

Yammer is designed to facilitate all that. So come on everyone, let’s Yam!